About

Brooke Holve lives and works in Sebastopol, CA.  A visual artist for three decades, her art practice has taken her through explorations of calligraphy, bookbinding, printmaking, digital technology and poetry.  Interested in combining mediums, she draws from each discipline to make mixed media works, installations, constructions, and artist books. Her probing work investigates culture, memory, place, language, time and natural phenomena.  She often looks for materials and objects that hold a history. The interplay of materials and methods inform her process; and overtime expose possibilities for shaping form. She often attempts to put together disparate ‘things’ that have come apart, but were once traditional structures used to preserve, protect and hold.

BIO

Born on an island visiting islands, revisiting her beginnings: Honolulu, Hawaii, a Naval military family. Holve moved every two years, lived on both coasts, east and west, making it difficult to connect with a place or its people, learning instead to be self-contained and adaptable. She was also raised a Catholic.

Two structures, both with rules, power, hierarchy, dominance, and protectionism shaped her formative years. Taught to conform to the conventions at an early age and take life seriously. And questioning wasn’t encouraged. Challenging patterns to break when she left home.

“I did not set out to be an artist and it did take me awhile to proclaim that I was. My father planted the seed although at the time I did not realize it and he never did. Driving by an abstract sculpture one day he exclaimed, ‘Why would anyone make something like that!’ Internally I remember questioning ‘Why would anyone make something like that?’”

Questioning opened a way. And she listened to what Theodore Roethke once wrote, “This urge wrestle resurrection of dry sticks” (Cuttings), moistening many dry sticks through revisiting, questioning, studying a variety of crafts and collaborating. An internal shaping that later she externalized, using shaping as a metaphor in her work.

Today she travels to island nations that in real time are visibly shaping, especially those with volcanoes, rift zones, and landscapes that are in flux, making, unmaking, remaking. She has observed how these natural processes of a region have shaped its landscape and people and now focuses and explores how natural processes and materials shape her work. She gravitates toward processes that mimic the earth as she cuts, pushes, crumples, pulps, sands, scrapes, pulls, tears and breaks.

Like the ongoing shaping and churning of the earth, Holve lets the materials and processes speak to each other emphasizing formation as process rather than immutable form. Her approach is physical and poetic and is driven by her desire to materialize language and experience in space.

CV

REVIEWS

     GABRIELLE GOPINATH
     SATRI PENCAK
 

CATALOGS

DIGITAL SKETCHES

Artist Residency at Skaftfell Visual Arts Center in Seydisfjordur, Iceland, September 2022. Video by Brooke Holve & Eve Chartrand.